:D

I don't know what to say! I feel really terrible about allowing myself to get depressed yesterday. Okay I know that sounds a little warped, but get a load of this: I have a wonderful day on Monday, end up feeling at the top of the world. And then yesterday, plunge into the deepest gloom in a long long time, simply because nothing seemed to be happening. And this morning it was almost as if fate was reproaching me for gross ingratitude, 'cos there I was again, out on a small boat! :D

Well, it was actually much better than two days back. This was a nice quick trip from our ship to the chase boat lying a few miles away, to transfer a passenger. And I had nothing to do other than grab the rail, wedge myself firmly at the bow and enjoy the ride! The sky was grey, and the sea a considerably darker shade of the same, but the world wasn't totally sans colour, the brim of the sky was touched with a light clear blue. It was just as cold as the other day, much to my deligt for some reason, and it started raining as well! Now, I'm not the kind of guy you will find standing out in the rain just for the fun of it, but out in the open sea, with the white spray from the boat's prow drenching my water-proof immersion suit, it was about as ideal a situation for rain as possible.

The sea was different today. The water was less choppy, but the swell's were much huger! I don't quite know how to explain this, you have to see it to believe it! But instead of metre high waves crashing against the boat, we had the sea turning into a huge undulating mass that carried us with it. No jerks, just smooth upheavals, if that makes any sense. And there was the usual company of curious birds flying low within a cable's length of the boat. And though I still didn't trust myself with my cam in the water, one of the guys, Dave had taken his along, and here's a pic.

Later in the day, I was coming up from the gun-deck from some errand when though the starboard hatch an extraordinary sight greeted me. I ran for my cam, and rushed up to the heli-deck. The sky was ablaze. It seriously was. Imagine a huge comet! With the sun at the edge of the horizon as the head, and the tail streaking out, sweeping along the horizon in a blinding arc. I saw my whale-watcher friend clicking away merrily with an SLR, but this time he had chosen his Canon digital SLR, I couldn't even ask for copies. He smiled apologetically at my cam. But I'm not too unhappy with my pics either. They don't come even close to doing justice to the spectacle I witnessed today, but will serve to refresh the images blazed across my mind.

PS. At the end of my shift, I got the best card I've been given in many, many years! And that made today even more special :).

Shattered glass

Brilliant movie. Something got me thinking about it today. Something to do with the fragility of joy. It's true then, when you are at the top, the only way to go is down.

It's down to this

I've got to make this life make sense

Can anyone tell what I've done

I miss the life

I miss the colours of the world

Can anyone tell where I am

'Cause now again I've found myself

So far down, away from the sun

That shines into the darkest place

I'm so far down, away from the sun

That shines to light the way for me

To find my way back into the arms

That care about the ones like me

I'm so far down, away from the sun again

It's down to this

I've got to make this life make sense

And now I can't tell what I've done

And now again I've found myself

So far down, away from the sun

That shines to light the way for me

- Away from the Sun

Three Doors Down

A W E S O M E !

And for those who know what it means: 'Kray - awesome'. Haven't got time now, but watch this space.

[7 hours earlier]

----

Ah, finally! I had the best day ever! I had landed up at the data processing station for another day of office work sitting in front of comps. But surprise, surprise! Barely an hour into shift I was told that I had been cleared to accompany the maintenance crew for a work-boat trip!

For those who can't quite grasp the 'awesome-ness' of the matter: the Trident is a 90 m long ship. It tows cables with sensors behind it over an area of roughly 5 Km by 1 Km. The work-boat is about 5-6 m long. And the sea this afternoon was fairly choppy with waves rearing upto 2 m. A typical maintenance trip constitutes criss-crossing this huge area to replace various components on the sensor cables, in that tiny boat! And most importantly: for the last 2 weeks I have been repeatedly reminded that I cannot possibly go out on these trips since I'm too inexperienced! And there was nothing I could do to make my seniors understand that that was precisely why I wanted to go!

Anyway, so the three other members of the work-boat crew accompanied me to the bridge for a tool-box meeting (briefing) where I was repeatedly told to concentrate on keeping myself onboard and reminded that if I did fall overboard, I had less than 10 minutes to get rescued, after which I would just freeze :D. (Oh, okay they weren't that menacing, but the message was pretty much the above.)

So eventually I made out to the launching bay (they lower the boat into the sea from about 10-15 ft high with towing lines) suitably swaddled in an immersion suit over my coveralls. Once out in the water, for the first few minutes I just couldn't stop grinning :D. One of the other guys, Neil, kept laughing, he said I reminded him of his first small boat trip. The sea was choppy, as I said before, and while it had translated to a benign, barely discernable rolling on the ship, it sent the workboat pitching and rolling like a roller coaster. I'm sure this was actually better than a roller-coaster, for you never know what's gonna hit you! One moment you are riding high on the crest of a huge wave, the next moment the water's gone from beneath you and you plunge down into the void! Boy, it was the most fantastic ride I've ever been on, and this was just the beginning!!

with Stan

As we went sailing up and down the cables, pulling sections onboard every now and then, I also noticed the sea birds up close for the first time. These are pretty large birds, with wingspans reaching upwards of 3 feet. Neil told me that they were called storm pestrels. And to my utter joy, one came and settled on the water barely a metre away from the boat and sailed along with us for a while. I swear it kept looking at us and glaring darkly, it probably thought we were poaching into it's fish supplies :D.

About an hour into the trip the cold was beginning to seep in through three layers of clothing. And imagine what my face, the only part exposed to the wind, was going through. I don't quite know, 'cos I couldn't feel a thing. The salt water sprayed all over us every now and then and the work on the cables meant most of my suit was wet with the cold sea water. My gloved hands couldn't provide much relief to my frozen face. Eventually I started blowing air over my nose. Remember Michelle Pfeiffer in One Fine Day when she blows her hair off her face? Well, I wasn't aiming for my hair, I was just trying to warm up my nose!! The attempt sent Stan, the coxwain, completely overboard for some reason. When we had gotten back to the ship another hour or so later, he was still laughing. (Oh c'mon! not actually overboard!!)

Oh, I almost forgot! At some point of time the bridge of the Trident informed us that they had spotted whales!! I was excited, till Stan told me that while they stay clear of bigger ships, whales usually come sniffing when they hear small boats. He also rather vividly describled to me the possible outcomes of a 10 m whale attempting to satisfy it's curiosiy about a boat half it's size. Of course we didn't see any whales, or I wouldn't be in a state to be writing this.

So the rest of the day I spent dutifully helping my boss teach me onboard data processing. My boss currently is Neil by the way, and he spends almost as much time discussing tactics for the Fantasy Premier League as anything else, so the day sped off like a dream! I love my job! I love my life! It is so AWESSOME!!! :P

Whirlwind

It's been proved yet again. I'm a bad influence. I moved into a new department today, and my new boss (I have a different boss in evey department and two more bosses overall. That makes it 6 bosses! Pheww.) had his worst day of this whole trip. As they say, everything that could go wrong, went wrong. By the end of the day, that is now, even I've learnt quite a few obscure UNIX commands that deal with vague problems affecting even vague-er systems and software.

I also realised, during the course of the day, that putting thoughts into words is not an easy thing, at least for me. Since, when I do happen to put my thoughts onto paper (or into a comp, same difference), they turn out to be difficult for other people to understand. And hey, I'm accepting this as a fact. Too many people have told me this for me to quietly turn my back on it and say, 'Duh! I'm not like that!!!' Anyway, since I'm temporarily at a loss as to how to deal with this, I'll ignore it anyway and get on with life :D.

Today seems to have been a day for introspection. Another thing that struck me was the vicious cycle that I get trapped into everytime I'm thinking about something. First I'm just plain thinking. Then at some point of time, I'll decide on evesdropping on my thoughts. That's where the trouble starts, soon enough I'm wallowing around trying to draw a line between my thoughts and my thoughts about those thoughts. You know what I mean? Of course you don't. Sometimes it's just easier to not think.... I'm currently reading Philip K Dick's 'Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep' and maybe that's gotto do something with these warped ramblings. Or maybe it's just me.

It gets better or it gets worse.

It never stays the same. Life, that is. Why this profound sounding statement? It's just that no two days for the last couple of weeks seem to have gone quite the same way.

It is an extremely satisfying feeling to get your hands dirty at work. What I'm trying to say is that at the end of the day when you finally clean up the grease etc., and make yourself a hot cuppa tea, it actually feels as though you've earned it! And thankfully, today things weren't nearly as bad as yesterday, so I managed to have dinner on time as well as watch the gorgeous sunset, happily clicking away :D.

Oh, and today I decided to make my first digi-cam video! The first one turned out pretty cool, though all it had was 30 seconds of propeller wash (under the back deck lights, and looking cool, but seemed a little boring). So I decided to star in the next one. And for convenience I held the cam vertical while recording. Back in my room when I uploaded the videos and pics onto my comp I realised that in the last video I was animatedly saying stuff about the coolness of life on board a ship, all the time rotated by ninety degrees to the vertical. And I have absolutely no clue how to turn the video upright :(.

Another rather interesting experiment that I tried today had to do with the moon. It was a half moon tonight, flitting in and out of clouds. With a little time on my hands I decided to put the Swift Seahawk to use. (That's what the manufacturers have chosen to call the waterproof binoculars.) After prolonged efforts, marred by the clouds and even more by the simple fact that it was a rather ludicrous idea. So eventually after managed a rather blurred quarted disk, I turned my attentions to a more attainable goal: any pic taken through the binocs :D.

Ah yes, I did manage a rather decent picture of a few birds today. All in all a very satisfying day's work indeed!